Finally I can order Olilo Full Fibre!

The Run Up

It’s been a long time coming, finally I’ve moved off my FTTC (50/9) connection from TalkTalk to a lovely FTTP (900/100) connection from Olilo! That’s right 20x faster downloads!

I have been keeping an eye on Better Internet Dashboard to see which Full Fibre service will reach my area first over the last few years, originally CityFibre was touting they were going to start building in my area soon back in 2022, nothing ever came to light. Then purple conduit appeared on the Telephone poles, but nothing much else, Openreach never used that purple conduit so it must have been laid for CityFibre, but they hit some financial issue would be my guess.

Eventually I started to see Openreach works pop up on the map early 2025 and they had started their work to rollout FTTP in my area, I saw a CBT (Connectorised Block Terminal) appear on my Telephone pole back at the start of November 2025, thinking it must be any week now surely. I checked some post codes nearby and it was orderable for them so I must be soon!

A month passed, another month passed.. more postcodes near me going live, but not mine! It comes to April 2026, my road and a little bit of the joining road still can’t order FTTP, but any other postcode I put in for my area can get FTTP! Sod’s law clearly in effect here, “I’m not allowed Fibre”!

When May 2026 rolled around I decided to contact Openreach to ask what’s going on, why can every postcode I try in my area order a service, yet I can’t order anything. Within a week I got a call from Openreach, they said by the end of June I should be live and if not to call back to follow up. They said they had to put some extra Telephone poles in to work around a blocked duct.

Who to choose

A few weeks later I wake up on Monday 1st June, and I find out I can finally order FTTP. Now I had a decision to make… I have two options as I didn’t want to stay with TalkTalk since I wanted Static IPs, which TalkTalk can’t offer me. In my opinion for a prosumer like myself currently there are two clear options, Andrews & Arnold or the new kid on the block Olilo.

Now prior to all this, I had been using a Andrews & Arnold L2TP service to gain a static IP over my TalkTalk VDSL line for well over a year, and in May Olilo launched their L2TP service, infact I was customer number 1 for the Olilo L2TP service, so I had been testing that for a number of weeks to see how it compared over the Andrews & Arnold L2TP, to ensure there’s no strange routing or latency issues. The service was rock solid, effectively no real difference between the two L2TP services, sometimes one L2TP has better latency to service X but then the other would be better to service Y, and we’re only talking 1-2ms anyway.

So looking at the two services, I could go with Andrews & Arnold for £85 per month for unlimited 1000/115 service or go for the same service on Olilo for £53 when comparing 1 month rolling contract. Olilo advertise Openreach 1000/115 as 900/110 as they prefer to show a more real world number where Andrews & Arnold show the Openreach wholesale number.

A&A £85 vs Olilo £53 for a very similar service, both are a 900mbit/s service, both over BT Wholesale backhaul in my case, the only bit that’s actually any different is the ISP bit and their peering. Olilo do charge extra for additional IPs, but even after a /29 the price is just £60. All prices mentioned here are correct at the time of writing. Since I didn’t see any speed, latency or peering problems with Olilo I decided I would take a 1 month rolling contract with Olilo or as they call it “Alt + F4 Anytime” plan. Should I get any issues, I can just simply OTS switch to Andrews & Arnold or any other ISP I wanted to. I placed the order and had to wait 3 weeks for the installation appointment.

Installation Day

Installation day woooo! I was a little worried they would cancel the appointment, as it was during one of the UK heatwaves we had in 2026. I made sure I had everything moved, unplugged cleaned ready for the engineer to attend at 8am. Prior to installation day, I also drilled a 10mm hole through the wall ready for them to use, so I could hopefully get the ONT where I wanted it. The engineer arrived about 8:30 am, I showed him externally where the hole was and discussed the route the fibre would take from the pole to entering the property. We then enter the property and I showed him where I wanted the ONT to sit with the hole I drilled, he said no problem, he started threading the fibre cable through the wall there and then. Then proceeded to mount the ONT on the wall, and plug the fibre cable in, at this point the internal side of the installation was done.

The original phone line wall bracket turned out to be now too low for current regulations, and it needed to be 1.5 meters higher, so trucks can safely pass under it. When it came to stringing the fibre between the telephone pole the new mounting bracket, they first cut and moved the copper line to the new mounting bracket, then replaced the wire wrap mount from telephone pole and house, to pulleys at each end, then used the old copper wire as a feeder to pull the new overhead fibre cable from the telephone pole to the property, which I thought was a very neat idea, no need to actually drop or raise any cables.

A few moments passed and they had now gotten the fibre from the telephone pole to the house, now it was just a matter of them tacking the fibre to the brickwork down to ground level to install the Customer Splice Point, which is where they splice the internal and external fibre together.

While the fibre clipping and splicing was taking place, I moved some of my equipment back to where the ONT had been installed, just enough to get internet access working, to confirm it worked before they left. As soon as I saw them place the fibre in the Fusion Fibre Splicer and press the button, I saw the PPPoE session come up with Olilo and I had internet!

The Verdict

I’ve now been on Olilo for over a week now, had no issues so far it’s just worked, every speedtest site or iperf3 test to OVH, UKServers or my workplace max out the line using a single stream. It’s working flawlessly, my main worry was single stream throughput issues, since that can really harm your download or VPN tunnel speeds. I do have a S2S wireguard tunnel to my Colocation, so this is very important to me.

What have I noticed other than the extra speed? Latency is 2-3ms lower than it was on my TalkTalk VDSL, hard to say if that’s because of the change in the last mile technology or just better backhaul routing down to London.

What I have mainly noticed, is even with my CAKE queue setup on my RouterOS, bufferbloat is much better on FTTP, it’s still a thing but the jitter is much better when the line is loaded compared to when the VDSL line was loaded. With the VDSL I had to drop the QOS limit a good amount to get a decent bufferbloat. I had it set to 50mbit, even though the line was syncing at 65-68mbit, most of the time now when I download there’s very little bloat happening on the line.

Now when it comes to an unloaded line, the FTTP is actually showing worse results compared to the VDSL, there’s more jitter about 0.5-1.5ms on the unload FTTP line, where with the VDSL jitter was very constantly around <0.5ms when unloaded. This will be down to that fact the GPON FTTP service is shared between customers, where VDSL is a dedicated pair back to the headend, there’s reports online of people on CityFibre where when they moved from GPON to XGSPON the unloaded latency jitter reduced. Which could well make sense with the Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) having more time slots for packets to be transmitted for each customer, due to the increased PON speeds going from 2.5/1.25 Gbit/s to 10/10 Gbit/s.

So what’s next? Well.. we wait for Openreach to rollout their XGSPON service in the coming years, so we can finally, hopefully have symmetrical download and upload speeds, and even faster speeds! Let’s hope the Openreach XGS trial goes well!